Matching Pieces
by RedArtisticQueen
Summary: Natalie Potter, twin to Harry Potter has lived in about eight or nine foster homes since she was six. Hidden from the wizard world her whole life, she isn't thrilled to become a part of it. Now that they've found her and sent her to Hogwarts with her twin brother "the-boy-who-lived", things could get really heated, really fast. Twinfic. Slightly AU fourth year. Not WBWL story.


(I do not own Harry Potter)

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Natalie stood with her suitcase on her bed, finishing packing up all her things. She wasn't one of those foster kids who lived out of their suitcases. She preferred to pretend she was going to stay in a place; so she would put her stuff in drawers and cupboards, and that was the way she would live. It made whoever's house she was staying at happy, because they thought that it meant she was ready and willing to 'integrate herself into the household'.

It didn't.

That wasn't it at all.

It was just sometimes, she wanted to pretend she was a normal kid with a normal family in a normal house. Sometimes she wanted to forget that she was Natalie _Potter_, and she was all by herself in the world because no one in her own universe wanted her. Sometimes she wanted to pretend that she was a regular Muggle kid, who could grow up to be _anything _she wanted, who could live and laugh and love without threats hanging over her head of death by dark wizard or any of the freaky occupational hazards that came with carrying a wand.

Now it wasn't going to be like that.

Natalie was packing up her stuff because she was about to turn fourteen, and they had finally found her. They had tracked her down. They had stepped into the house that morning like they had a right to be there, with their billowy clothes that drew looks from Mrs. Nanigan , who was so muggle you could taste it, but still in the good kind of way. And when they had looked at her, like she should be grateful, like they had rescued her, why on earth would they think that? She had hidden for years, so well that even a Hogwarts letter never reached her. She didn't need magic or pressure or wizards at all.

She finally understood that Muggles weren't stupid or ignorant, but they were living in beautifully ignorant _bliss._

"When are you coming back?" Stacy asked her. Stacy was basically-six and classically cute. Her front teeth were always crooked but it made a really adorable smile, and her hands were always covered with marker doodles that nobody remembered her getting and Mrs. Nanigan could never fully wash off. Stacy hadn't been alive long, but she'd been alive long enough to know that Natalie left a lot but she always came back. Natalie sighed and bent down to the girl.

"Stacy honey, I'm not coming back this time."

The child didn't look like she understood. "But you always come back," she said, confused. "They always send you back, right? Because they're never the right ones. That's what you say."

That's what Natalie said to every child she saw that was kicked out or ran. Honestly, those were the only two options. You were either kicked out or you ran, because foster kids were either angels or devils from what she had seen in eight years of the system. But sometimes, she didn't believe her own lie.

"I know. But I don't have a choice this time."

"You always have a choice," Stacy said, her lower lip coming out in a pout as if whining would make her right. "You told me that too."

"I told you a lot of things didn't I?" Natalie pulled on Stacy's pigtails; she did them every morning. "Okay then. They told me that I could come with them or something else would happen, and I didn't like the other thing, so I said I would go. And this time they need me for something, so I'm not coming back."

Stacy's shoulders started to tremble and she threw her arms around Natalie. "Natalie, I'm gonna miss you!" she cried. "You're fun to have around! What am I gonna do when you don't ever come back again?"

Natalie hated this. She hated sitting on her bed and trying to pretend that what was about to happen was not about to happen. Not that her life was _nice_ or _pleasant_, but it was real and her own. Stacy would grow up and have that.

Natalie wouldn't. And now she was making Stacy cry.

"You can wait for other things," Natalie told her, as she hoisted the girl onto her hip and opened the door. "This year you'll be starting real school. First grade."

"But I wanted to show you," she said, her voice still whiny and her face still pink. "I wanted to show you what we'd do. Learning things, like _you_ do at school. I wanted to know things just like you!"

"I know," Natalie said, thudding her suitcase down the stairs one step at a time. "But you can show your Mommy. She'd love to see it. All the things you're going to learn. So when you're in school, I'll be in school, just the same. We'll both be learning things."

Natalie stopped at the corner. When she turned the corner, there would be the men and women with robes and wands, smiling and waiting for her to smile back, which wasn't going to happen anytime soon. She took a deep breath and tried to still her beating heart, before stepping out into the open.

Immediately the man with brown hair and a tired face stepped forward. He'd introduced himself first and Natalie had been immediately repulsed. "I'm Remus Lupin," he'd said. And then before he could say the words himself, she put in (rather flatly), "A friend of James and Lily." He'd looked confused, so she'd clarified. "James used to talk about you all the time." To which he had appeared to be slapped, and Natalie had put it together quite quickly: what everyone didn't know and what apparently she wasn't supposed to either.

It was now impossible for her to like the man.

"Natalie?" he asked cautiously. She'd made it clear she liked her space. "Are you ready to go?"

Natalie opened her mouth to respond, but the basically-six year old on her waist latched her arms around Natalie's neck suddenly and yelled loudly. "No she isn't because she's not going with you because people have a choice and she's choosing that she doesn't want to go!"

It almost made Natalie cry. "Stacy, hush," she said quietly.

Stacy looked confused. "But Natalie, you said-"

"I know what I said," she said gently, setting down the child. "And I do think we have a choice. But sometimes, people have to choose certain things, even if they don't want to."

"Is this one of those things?"

"This is one of those things."

Stacy frowned a basically-six years old frown, but let go of Natalie's bag. Feeling like she was walking towards her doom, she approached Remus Lupin with an appropriate level of caution.

"Yeah, I'm ready to go, if you've cleared everything with the Drecils." That was the family she was staying with that summer. Her foster home always somehow changed while she was away at school every year, and she was never sure how it happened or even if anybody knew, but she was never at a house two summers in a row. In light of current events, she supposed it had something to do with them. Or it might have had something to do with her, which she highly suspected. No family could pretend to like her for more than a summer, surely.

"Of course we have," said another voice from near the doorway, a face that she'd forgotten the name to. "What do you take us for? Amateurs?"

"Shut it!" she'd said before she could stop her mouth, and then cursed silently. She took a step back and clenched her fists before she allowed herself to speak again. Her mouth always moved faster than the rest of her. "Sorry," she muttered. "I've been spending too much time in the States, I guess."

She knew that that really wasn't it at all, but she tried to keep an honest expression.

"It's fine," Remus assured her. "Come on, let's just get you out of here."

He said 'get you out of here' like it was a bad place they had to escape as soon as possible, like being in the muggle world for too long a period of time would physically do something to them. Maybe she was being too defensive, she thought, but the whole thing did honestly make her feel slightly unwanted. It seemed she was always at least slightly unwanted.

As they made to exit the house, after Natalie had hugged Mrs. Nanigan and told her to stay safe, Stacy ran up to her. Her face was totally red now, and tears were streaming down her little cheeks.

"Don't leave," she wailed. "This doesn't have to be one of those choosings you don't want to choose! I don't want you to go!"

Natalie abandoned her bag and put her arms around Stacy, whispering comforting words that she knew from experience were not heard, per say, but felt.

"Hey," she said. "Hey don't cry, hey now." She whispered things that mother usually said to their children, or what Mrs. Nanigan said to Stacy when she cried other times, but she purposely wasn't stepping in because this was Natalie's business. She immediately felt annoyed that behind her on the porch were four wizards waiting for her, probably impatiently, wondering why she couldn't handle her own surrogate sister.

"Hey, Stacy, calm down okay?" She stroked the girl's hair. It was blonde, and curly in a way that only little girls could pull off. "I have to go with them, because this is one of those things, okay? And I might not come back, okay, and I don't want to let you down. But I'm gonna try to come back and see you, because I love you."

She couldn't remember the last time she had said those words to someone who wasn't Stacy Nanigan. She doubted it had ever happened and she doubted that it ever would.

"I love you too, Natalie," she said into her chest. "And I'll wait for you, like always."

"No, don't do that. Don't wait for me. When I come back I want it to be the best kind of surprise. I know you like surprises."

Natalie finally pried the basically-six year old off her, where she went straight to her mother and stood behind her knee, just like when she was barely-over-one and they'd first met. The sight made her angry and sad at the same time. Stacy waved, and one of her pigtails was lopsided as she tilted her head. Natalie waved back, and shut the door behind her.

It took three full minutes to catch her breath on the front steps to her favorite house in the world. She felt like she was going to explode, because she was angry and betrayed and sad and also elated at the same time. She was thrilled beyond words, because that was how it felt whenever Stacy said that to her:  
"I love you." Sure foster moms said it, but they only said it for the precise reason that they thought you'd never heard it before, and it was always fake. How could you love every child that came to stay in your house? There couldn't be people that kind. That was why she thought she was always moving when she thought hadn't done anything wrong. Nobody could love everybody that much.

But just that one simple "I love you too, Natalie." from an basically-six year old girl who was begging her not to go had ripped what was left of her heart into shreds but also pieced a little bit of it back together again. Mrs. Nanigan might have loved her, but might not have, actually. In Natalie's experience, adults didn't love.

Now she was leaving behind that suburb in America , full knowing she might never see it again.

One tear slipped down her cheek and she brushed it off lightning fast, aware that they were still waiting for her to go forward.

"Let's go," she said in a strained, wavering voice. "Just take me to wherever it is you want. Please. Let's just go."

The others studied her worriedly, but walked forward, to where, Natalie didn't know, but they were in motion, and Natalie needed motion to avoid breaking down.

Remus Lupin leaned down to her. "Are you okay?" he asked Natalie.

Natalie didn't answer for a long time.

"I'm feeling a lot of different okays," she settled, choosing a quote from some movie she'd seen. "And until I go through all of them, I think I'll just say yes."

Natalie hadn't felt the 'right' kind of okay in so long that she thought maybe her other kinds of okay had replaced it. Maybe she'd left that okay back in one of Stacy Nanigan's pigtails, where she might never see it again.

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**Sappy beginning to an actually-not-very-sappy fic. Two things to say**

**(1)This will be OOC. Probably more than 'slightly'. That is not on purpose. I ****_know_**** that I suck at keeping characters in-character. Even if I memorized the books (which I have, actually) it wouldn't help. If something being pretty OOC bothers you, just leave, okay. Because I ****_don't_**** want half a million people telling me that 'that character would never say/do/think like that' because I ****_know_**** and I'm ****_trying. _****Okay?**

**and (2) This will be canonically different, and I am not good at writing pairings anyway. I'm not necessarily changing them, and I'm not saying that there are no pairings because there ****_are_**** pairings. I just don't want you to expect super high or super low. No radical ships, no headcanons, but it's one of those turn-your-head-and-squint things. **

**Peace!~ RedArtisticQueen**


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